On the spiritual level, we should rejoice in the fact that Jesus sees us as perfect in God’s sight despite our flaws. Yes, we see our own flaws and we feel our sins and limitations and history so deeply. God is also aware of our sin; after all, He sent Jesus to die for us to save us from it! God is not blind to our shortcomings like those newly in love are. Yet our sins are covered by the finished work of Jesus. Once we have trusted in Jesus, we are whiter than snow (Ps 51:7).

When you are early on in a romantic relationship, everything about the one you love is fantastic. You cannot find a flaw. They appear perfect to you in every way. Their laugh, their mannerisms, their jokes, everything is just ideal in your eyes. This is what it meant by the phrase “love is blind”. Driven by love, you only see the good and you cannot see the bad.
Of course, the other person is not entirely good; no-one is even close! They will have physical flaws, particular temptations, personality issues and a history. If you remain together, you will come to see some of these problems. That laugh that was so endearing might come to grate on you; that little mannerism that was written off as cute might be identified as actually being selfish or rude. We only see the reality over time.
We see this in Song of Songs as well. The woman notes in chapter 1 that her skin was darker than most women because she worked outside in the vineyard (1:6). In a culture that valued light skin, she would not be seen by most as conventionally beautiful. Yet when her man looks at her, all he sees is beauty. She is the “most beautiful amongst women” (1:8). He looks at her and sees only the good.
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God has given us an additional, and even more powerful, witness to our salvation – God’s own Holy Spirit, who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:16. Yet in spite of this witness being more certain, it is the one we understand the least, and are very often the beneficiaries of without our even being aware.

“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” Romans 8:16.
“Am I a Christian?” and “How can I be sure?” are two of the most important questions that we can ever ask ourselves. Our eternities are at stake over this matter, and, to heighten its importance still further, we all will have histories of getting some things wrong, even when we are convinced that we are right.
Thankfully (and graciously), God has given us some help in regard to the assurance of our saving faith in Jesus Christ:
Firstly, throughout the Bible we are given a variety of genuine marks of a Christian that we can use to test ourselves with. We might look at the fruits of the Spirit, or read how a humble, self-sacrificing spirit is characteristic of a follower of Christ, and see whether we manifest any of these marks in our own lives and characters (even if in just small ways). We could even use many of these marks together which could then, potentially, leave us with a fairly strong argument either for or against our salvation.
Secondly, God has given us an additional, and even more powerful, witness to our salvation – God’s own Holy Spirit, who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, as Paul tells us in Romans 8:16. Yet in spite of this witness being more certain, it is the one we understand the least, and are very often the beneficiaries of without our even being aware.
A favourite illustration of Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones (itself being borrowed from the Puritan Thomas Goodwin), that he used a number of times throughout his Romans preaching series, was the experience of a young child. This child was able to objectively assure himself of his father’s love by bringing to remembrance the loving things that the father had said and done to and for him. The Holy Spirit’s witness, however, is akin to the father swooping down, picking up the child in a loving embrace, and showering him with kisses. Both tell of the father’s love for the child, but the second witness is a deeper, felt experience. This is, as Paul describes in Romans 5:5, “The love of God [being] poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
How is it, then, that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God, that we might recognise it and benefit from it still further than just a mere experiential feeling?

By testifying to our being the Father’s children

Any parents, I am sure, will be familiar with seeing their children act in a way reminiscent of themselves, and concluding, “Yes, they are definitely my child!”
Likewise, the Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God when we reflect the character and heart of our heavenly Father.
This can be summarized as being a love of holiness and a hatred of sin; or a heart that loves what the Father loves and hates what the Father hates. Of course, this will always be imperfectly on our part whilst we remain in this world, but it is when we obey the Spirit’s leading in choosing those things that the Father loves, and overcoming the temptation to choose those things which the Father hates, that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.
Is it any wonder that we feel least certain of our salvation when we are embracing sin? This is, understandably, when the Holy Spirit’s witness with our spirits is at its quietest. We will also find that the opposite is true: we enjoy an assurance of our salvation at its strongest when we are embracing God’s righteousness.

By testifying to our being children of the Father

It is only through the Holy Spirit that we can ever cry out to God, “Abba, Father” with an assurance that what we are saying is true. Firstly, we have seen that it is in our obedience that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Secondly, and as yet a further act of grace toward us, the Holy Spirit also bears witness to our spirits that we are children of God, albeit in a different manner, even when we sin.
The preference must always be obedience to the Spirit’s leading and to the will and law of God, but, sadly, we fail, and we fail often.
As a Christian, then, how do you fall down before God in repentance of your sins?
Is it as falling down before a harsh taskmaster, where you cry out in fear for yourself, “God, I am so sorry for committing this sin… please don’t hurt me; please don’t strike out at me; please don’t destroy me!”?
Or are your cries more in line with, “Oh, my God and heavenly Father, I am so sorry for doing this wickedness against You; I am so sorry for letting You down again! How You still embrace me in love I will never know, but I know that You do, and I am so thankful, Father, that You love me so much!”?
You can only pray like the latter because the Holy Spirit is bearing witness with your spirit that you are a child of God.

By testifying to our union to Jesus Christ

If we are children of God, then heirs – heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ (v.17).
We are children of God because of our relation to the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Through mystical, spiritual union to Jesus we are adopted into God’s family, being made legitimate children to a Father who loves us.
As a married man of seventeen years, there have never been any times during those seventeen years when I have been married to my wife any less or any more than at other times. However, it is when I am in a loving embrace with my wife that I feel that marriage the most.
It is when we are in our loving embraces with our spouse, Jesus Christ, that we feel our union to Him the most: when we pray, praise, read of, hear of, serve and worship Him with love-filled hearts. In these things the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are united to Jesus in spiritual marriage, and if united to Jesus, then children of God! We cannot be surprised to see that Romans 8, which is one of the most loved and precious chapters of Scripture, closes by stating that the love of God is found in Jesus Christ Himself. As children of God, we find all of the love of God in Jesus Christ, and it is all given to us through Him.
Conclusion
For the past year I have been a father to a gorgeous, naughty, anxiety-riddled little beagle dog, Lilo. When she is afraid, she has a tendency to face away from me, but scoot herself backwards until there is firm contact between herself and myself. This works quite nicely, as it enables me to wrap my arms around her in a loving embrace and whisper to her, “It’s okay, little Lilo. You’re family now. I’ll always be here for you.”
When we are feeling most anxious about our salvations, we would do well to learn from her, bringing ourselves into contact with our heavenly Father through whole-hearted worship, casting ourselves entirely upon Him, where, when we know what to listen out for, we can hear, and feel, the Holy Spirit witness with our spirits that we are children of God – that we would be assured that we are truly loved, and we are truly His, in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Matthew Prydden is an itinerant preacher from Wales, Reformed, Calvinistic, and Evangelical. This article is used with permission.
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The resistance to socialist ideology remains powerful in the West, ironically,  especially among the “Proletariat,” the working class. Roughly half the electorate in the US is anti-socialist or “reactionary.” Some recent European elections appear to be in part a repudiation of internationalism, if not socialism per se, though the two go hand-in-hand.And the most powerful voting bloc opposed to socialism, at least in the US, is indeed the Church. This is because the natural law moral commitments of the Church are opposed to socialist ideology.

As it supplants Revelation [Revolution] acquires the influence of a new Religion of Humanity, kindling in the hearts of its confessors a fanaticism that acknowledges no distinction of means in order to attain its ends.
Groen van Prinsterer, Unbelief and Revolution, 1847
The Christian…imagines the better future of the human species…in the image of heavenly joy…We, on the other hand, will this heaven on earth.
Moses Hess, A Communist Confession of Faith, 1846
Why is This Happening?
Polling indicates that currently, only 18% of Americans are “satisfied,” with the way things are going in the US, with 81% believing that our democracy is “threatened.” Politically-alert Americans hardly need reminding that our political division is disturbing, with both major parties threatening that if the other is elected, this could mean the end of our country. Indeed, we seem to be coming apart. The cause of the polarization is far more than discrete policy disagreements over defense or taxation, or mere regional factionalism. Rather the cause is an ideological crisis. In fact, it is the culmination of a centuries-old religious war.
An impressive number of books, including by Evangelicals, sounds a deafening alarm that variations of “critical theory” or “identity politics” are taking over our republican form of government, the news media, education, corporations, charitable foundations, and even churches — placing our society and even our civilization at risk.[1] Some trace the ideology to the early 20th century, to the Frankfurt School, or limit it to the rise of “identity politics,” denying that it has anything to do with classical Marxism.
What then we are dealing with? While the Church must recognize a dangerous trend, we can’t address it adequately unless we understand its origins. This will help us detect it, and also resist it when it has begun to influence the Church itself. We cannot afford to be “…the incompetent physician who fights the symptoms but does not know the cause of the disease.”[2]
Natural Law, Humanism, and Socialism 
My thesis is as follows: Just as natural law is the moral theory of Christendom prior to modernity, socialism is the moral theory of modern atheistic Humanism. Because modern socialism is born of another religion, Humanism, it is hostile to Christianity-based natural law; indeed, it seeks to destroy it.[3] Its hostility to Christendom and to natural law is analogous to Baal or Moloch worship in the Old Testament, the practice of which continually threatened the worship of Yahweh. And just as ancient Israel had to resist pagan idolatry, the Church must resist the siren’s song of socialist ideology.[4]
The extreme dangers of socialism should be well-known, but in a kind of collective amnesia, no doubt intended by some, these dangers are often ignored or explained away. As Milan Kundera said, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” Joshua Muravchic estimates that since 1917, 100 million people have died under socialist regimes, including the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, China under Mao, and Cambodia under Pol Pot.[5] In addition, severe prohibitions on freedom of speech, secret police, the arrest, persecution, and assassination of political opponents, forced labor camps, wiretapping and other forms of surveillance, and religious discrimination are typically constitutive of socialist regimes. The detection of socialist ideology should be met with the same alarm as calls for the reintroduction of chattel slavery or concentration camps. Tragically, for reasons I will explore below, this is not happening.
Part of the reason for our forgetting is that as a cultural phenomenon, socialism is not necessarily linked to theory — socialist convictions can develop without direct exposure to socialist theory proper, sometimes through a naive desire for a perfect world free of inequality, but also through guilt for one’s advantages, or the incentivizing of envy. Guilt manipulation goes hand in hand with the vice of envy, wherein those with advantages, whether earned or not, are resented by those who see themselves as inferior, the “superiors” then responding with guilt and seeking atonement through compliance with their demands.[6] This is of course the strategic genius of the Oppressor/Oppressed distinction, i.e., that envy, a violation of the 10th Commandment, can be weaponized to produce guilt, one of, if not the most powerful incentive in the human psyche.
If a political candidate or party is socialistic, the Church must oppose that candidate or party by uniformly voting against them at the very least, if not pursuing all legitimate political means to defeat them. In our American political context, there are two dominant parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. As is well-recognized, the Democratic Party has been trending steadily toward socialism at least since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Despite its manifest flaws, the Republican Party offers the only political instrument the Church has to resist our nation’s further slide into socialist policies and practices.
Natural Law and the State
The witness of nature together with Scripture affirms three institutions ordained by and under the sovereignty of God, each independent and possessing its own authority, yet deeply interrelated: the church, the family, and the state. When the integrity of these three are violated, e.g., when the state demands reverence and loyalty due God alone, or violates the sanctity of the family by hiding gender confusion from parents, or requires that Christians remain silent to accommodate modern ideology, the result is not only idolatrous, but calamitous for all three institutions.
A key element in maintaining the integrity of the three institutions is private property. The integrity of private property is recognized by Scripture in the 8th and 10th Commandments, “You shall not steal” and “You shall not covet,” as well as numerous additional verses and passages (e.g., Deut. 19:14; Prov. 23:10; Rom. 13:9). Private property defines and restricts the boundaries of each institution and is thus a buttress against the depredations of innate depravity. National borders function similarly to prevent the absorption of one state by another, or indeed, all of humanity under one tyrannical state. National borders also provide persecuted peoples with the opportunity to escape discrimination and persecution, as we see historically with the Moravians, the Huguenots, and the Puritans.
Whereas socialism assumes the cause of human evil lies in how society is organized, and believes the transformation of society will liberate people to express their inherent goodness, Christian natural law assumes the opposite, that the cause of evil lies in the human heart.[7]  Neither the state nor the church may demand that Christians hand over their property (1 Kings 21:1-23). Private property thus justifies efforts to resist the tyrannical absorption of family and church by the state.
According to the fifth commandment, certain forms of inequality are “natural.” The man is the natural and biblical head of the family, and men are to lead the church. All must respect persons in authority, whether they are teachers, employers, or political leaders (1 Pet. 2:13; Titus 3:1).
Ultimately, all authority is given by God in Christ (Rom. 13:1; Matt. 28:18). Thus, mere government by consent of the governed is not enough without recognizing the authority of God because all authority is given by God, and he demands worship. Government by consent of the governed in a republic, with strong checks and balances to prevent tyranny by any one branch, is arguably the best form of government ever devised by man, yet for government by consent of the governed to function properly, the voters, or a critical mass of them, must recognize God as sovereign and vote according to the creation order he designed for our well-being, as the Founders recognized. When the voters reject this, or begin voting against the natural order, God allows a society to become degenerate and self-destructive (Rom. 1:18-32).
Depending on how far along a society is in becoming depraved, honest, candid discussion in mutual respect between Christians and non-Christians will become increasingly difficult, such that “finding a middle way” will require moral compromise. Consequently, there will be increasing conflict between those who fear God and those who reject him.
Socialism: A Very, Very Short History
In confronting socialism, the first thing the Church must realize is that socialism is less an ideology than a phenomenon.[8] It is akin to a virus that can affect a society’s thinking such that the state begins attacking or undermining other institutions God has established, especially, the church and the family. Thus, socialism is hardly new. Secondly, we must realize is that it is one of the most powerful forces in human history. A popular misconception is that socialism began during the French Revolution. In fact, socialism predates Christianity by several centuries. It has a long history across disparate cultures. Ancient Egypt and the Inca Empire employed elements of collective control that resemble modern versions of socialism. In Assemblywomen, Aristophanes depicts a feminist-socialist coup d’etat in which private property is banned, children are raised “in common,” and full sexual equality is demanded by law, along with “free love,” the rejection of monogamy. Plato recommends a socialist state in his Republic which institutes collective ownership, and replaces the family with common parenting and state assignments for procreative coupling. Thomas More’s Utopiaabolishes private property and legalizes euthanasia, though he retains the sexual morality of traditional Christianity. In the era of Christendom, splinter groups led by Anabaptists sought to create socialist societies, often with horrific results.
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